Cool Party
Sounds good! Count me in!

Myke

Yeah!!! MMMMMMMMike!

Awesome! I'll be in town from night of 23rd-night of 27th. Is everyone free on the 26th? Let's all get together!!!!!!! On the 26th!!!!!!!!!!

Compare & Contrast: Staining Furniture vs. World of Warcraft

Staining Furniture:
Pros:
You end up with some furniture that is colored differently than when you bought it.
Cons:
All other aspects of staining furniture.

World of Warcraft:
Pros:
You have lots of fun with your friends (especially last night).
You get to live out your childhood fantasies of staying up until 4:00 in the morning, every night.
Cons:
After 14 consecutive hours, your chair begins to smell.

Killing ogres last night was really really fun. I'm glad that I'm within spitting distance of your characters' levels, finally. Although I'm going to take a break for the next day or two... got some other shit to do.

Myke Report

Will be back in LA from the 23rd, not having submitted thesis yet... doh! Not sure how long I'll be around (as I've no return ticket yet) but hopefully will get a chance to see some or all of you whilst there. UCLA job has been offered, so will be teaching in LA again from April until the end of June - maybe longer if I get another job. Glad that Con went well, it pained me greatly not to be there...

Ok, I can't think of anything else to write. Hope to see you. My numbers will all be the same, and I gather that by now I won't have any of yours so ring me. Please?

Myke

Yesterday the ladyfriend and I drove down Highway 1 to Santa Cruz. This is a beautiful drive down a coastal road with magnificent trees, stunning coastline, and attractive and varied geographical features. The entire time I kept thinking: "this zone is great!" and how great it would be to get out of the car and run around on all the hills, presumably looking for ore to mine.

Pretty pathetic! Unfortunately for me, she is going to stay at her uncle's for the next couple nights, giving me unfettered access to Azeroth.

Aeryk: Thanks for the precious gift of leather! The gems were very handy as well. I ran out of screws so I couldn't build your gun this morning (in the few furtive moments I had while my girlfriend was in the shower), but I'll get to it tonight. (Screws are easy-peasy to make, I just need to mine some copper first.)

All youse guys: unless you need the cash (and I'd understand!), mail me any malachite, tigerseye, or assorted other gems you find. You can charge me for postage. Also, obviously, if you find any engineering plans mail 'em over.

The Blog is dead, long live the Blog

Since World of Warcrack has entered our lives, the poor blog is being neglected. I can attribute this to a few things:

1) The most active posters are spending all their time playing WoW and talking to each other in game and have no need for an update of their realworld lives.

2) The least active posters are not playing WoW and are continuing the status quo of not posting anyway.

To fix this problem I offer this solution:

Those of us playing WoW need to get out in the world and experience life and blog about it! And those of us not playing WoW (the fools...) need to up their posts for a time being to take up the slack for all the WoW crackfiends. We have a problem, we understand that, we just need some time to work things out, okay!??! Is that okay with you!?!/ No, you know what, YOU have the problem, not ME! How can you say, MY best interest, I went to YOUR schools, YOUR churches, YOUR institutional learning facilities so how can you say that I'm crazy...

All I wanted was a Pepsi...

gggggggg rrgrgrrrgrrg..... paint soooo tasty, like suckling straight from the teats of a paint cow. Oh the colors.....

Salutations Art! We have not been formally introduced. I'm Denis. Jon won me at a raffle and hasn't had the heart to put me out yet. So they let me into the Action Team as the team gimp.

As to your question, Jon's right in trying the forum at RPG.net for more informed opinions. That said, if I may put in my 2 coppers. I think the open license d20 system has the broadest reach. The number of products published for the system is larger than any other. I don't know much on the legal side, but it seems it might be easier to put out a product with that system than trying to get a publisher to use outside source material. The actual game mechanics outside standard fantasy D&D I don't know much about. Though 3rd ed. did move more toward a skill based system, I'm not sure if it's enough for your needs. If you have a chance, take a look at the "D20 Modern" series. I'm not sure if that is open license, but you could get some ideas. Not so much class reliant, just basic archetypes and I think more skill based. Plus I think it has gnoll pimps! That alone is worth the price of admission. Oh yeah maybe d20 Star Wars for more sci fi stuff.

One more announcement. You BASTARDS!!!!!!! I'm all twitchy from the crack. The crack that is World of Warcraft. Female Night Elf Hunter - Kasiopaeia (Draenor server). booooooooo!

i a,mun. i mean drunl. drunk. i say hi to art and denis and jael and i am goinhg to play some wwoww rarcraft right now. i am the king of nihght rlgd - u guys dont know how hard it is to type rtight now. i wil l win all.

erg.

Adventures in job-searching, from a Christian movie casting post: We pray before every shoot and believe God will anoint the actors with performances that will stun theatrical audiences. “Gravity” is a family motion picture that will be enjoyed by theatrical audiences worldwide even if they have no Judeo Christian experience. Fuck yeah, prepare for anointment, bitches!

Art, to answer your easiest quest, Gurps is a skill-based point-buy system. I'm not all that knowledgeable of it myself, despite buying 3 billion books at the Gamekeeper fire sale, but essentially for most rolls you roll 3d6, trying to roll under either your stat, or your skill.

For your OGL/business questions I would head over to www.rpg.net, register for an account (free), and post your questions in their Business forum since I think for the most part The Action Team knows fuck-all about the business end of RPG publishing. (Although Eric has researched the brick-and-mortar end quite a bit.)

As far as skill-based systems go, GURPS is the classic, and they just released their new edition so for the next year or so new releases in that line will still seem shiny and exciting. I have no idea how their licensing arrangements work, though; all of their books are published by SJ Games, and most of their books are either general-use (Romans, Dragons, etc.) or are tied to already-existing fiction licenses. I haven't seen a lot of new, original settings coming out of there.

I personally am a fan of Savage Worlds as well, which is also a skill-based system and from my brief research offers pretty good publishing deals. Of course they have a much smaller slice of the RPG pie than GURPS has (which itself has a much smaller slice than D&D/d20). However, they do pretty well for themselves, and they have a small but active fanbase.

SW has a pretty specific philosophy, which is that their system is geared for fast, finite campaigns, which a good amount of tactical crunch but simple and fast combat and record-keeping. If you are planning for a d20 level of complexity then they're not what you're looking for.

Need your opinions..


So the project I'm working on is simultaneously looking to release a RPG version of the concept at the same time as the first person shooter game.. or maybe a little before the computer edition. Anyone know much about the Open Gamers License system and/or d20 "open-source" licensing? I'm wondering if you guys have used any self-made systems in your many travels through gaming-land and have an opinion on them OR.. if you have a potential alternative in mind for creating a custom RPG world.

Essentially, they want to use more of a skills-based system (along the lines of Warhammer) instead of "levels", and the setting is going to be futuristic in nature with plenty of gunplay and whatnot. I was thinking of suggesting GURPS, but I don't honestly remember what the underlying game mechanics are like. Does it use percentage-rolls, and would it support a skill-based advancement of characters?

Ideas?

PastramiCon and Beyond

O rugs: I dont think you understand the situation fully. You have been nominated to rent AND fly us to GenCon AT YOUR EXPENSE. Just one of those kind things we do to use, accomodate! Yeah... To accomodate the virgin GenCon goers.

Seriously though, GenCon Indy was brought up this past weekend and there seemed to be a good deal of interest. Of course that would be heavily dependent on financial situations for those involved. Particularly Jon and I. We really aught to make a determination on that one by the end of february. Jon and I need to land jobs between now and then.

Dennis, well we always knew their was an evil side to him. No gamer is without one. Dennis you would make a ruthless, perhaps even insane general.

D>M>

Denis

You would never expect such behavior from relaxed, vegetarian, demure, well groomed, unassuming, meticulous at painting, Denis, but truer words have never been blogged before:

"Also, don't fuck with Denis because he will fucking go crazy on your ass."

Ruthless. Just ruthless. In fact, I don't think I can hang with that guy anymore, I saw a side of him that just disturbed me, so Denis, please don't call me anymore. Unless it's to play Blood Bowl....

Again, congrats on the painting contest!

Aaaaaaron with the random object up the nose manuever!

That totally sounds like a great time was had by all, even if Aaron was shoving things in bodily orifices yet again.. hehe.. I'd be totally down with flying peeps out to Indy but that's a looong way to go! In all honesty, it'd be a lot cheaper and a lot faster to go commercially unless a "road" trip sounded like a lot of fun. With three passengers, we'd be lucky to pull 150kts the whole way.. so that'd probably take a couple days each way in the smaller aircraft I'm rated for. =/

The idea sounds fun though. =)

On the software development thing, it's all just really in the beginning stages, but I do know they're looking for some 2D/3D modellers. Any of youse guys good with that and interested in some freelance work? When they've been hiring out piecemeal for some of the artwork and concept designs but I think they want to get a steady relationship established with some peeps.

I'm going to be working on the project at night and on weekends for a while until it looks like things are getting more involved. We shall see!

Best,

~T.

Jon's Con Report

This was a good con! We all won tons of swag. WoTC had a very large booth with tons of demo games. (D&D Minis, MLB Showdown, etc..) You could go to the prize booth and get a "character sheet," and then do demos. For every demo you did your sheet got a stamp... when you were ready you could go back to the prize booth and roll a large, foam 20-sided die. The goal was to "hit" monsters at increasing DCs. The first one got you some Magic cards n' shit, the second one got you some D&D/Star Wars miniatures, the third roll got you a D&D rulebook or boardgame, and the fourth roll got you a bunch more of the above. Well, all of us got the first two rolls, and everyone except Eric, I think, got the third. So we all got some form of board game or rulebook plus a bunch of other shit.

So yeah, I won Risk: Godstorm, Rudy won the future version, Aaron won Betrayal at House on the Hill (a very fun, sorta cheesy, "horror" board game... very good win). A good few additions to the boardgame pool.

And yeah, I bought Twilight Imperium 3rd ed on the first day. I decided to get my obscene purchasing over with. We tried to play it on Saturday night, only to discover that due to a printing error we were missing an important piece. Fortunately I was able to go to the booth on Sunday and get a replacement.

(BTW, I've had TI from way back! I still have the 1st edition with the crappy chits, somewhere. I think it's a great game. They made a -lot- of changes to the rules for this edition so that it's a little quicker [<5 hours] and so that everyone is involved more often. You go 'round robin activating actions and systems, rather than one person taking his entire turn at a time.)

So we played Godstorm instead. It was extremely late by this time and we were all beat, and I overturned the board halfway through, but it was a good time. Johnny, you'll definitely like it. Oh, don't be red because Aaron stuck two pieces up his nose, in retaliation for which I yelled "take it take it take it take it" whenever he made a move. Also, don't fuck with Denis because he will fucking go crazy on your ass.

Aaron, Denis and I stuck around on the last day to see the results of the miniature painting contest Denis entered. It's a good thing we did because he won! His mini kicked ass over the rest of the competition and he won a shitload of paints. The best part of -that- was when they were taking a picture of him and Aaron was yelling "Denis, smile! Smile!"

We finished it off with a fine meal at El Gringo. Ah, nourishment.

(By the way: did anyone win an MLB Showdown starter? That game was actually pretty fun. I'd play it again, despite knowing nothing about baseball....)

Sounds like the Con was ON!

Sorry I missed it.. but in all reality, it was probably for the best with the whole office-fire thing we've been dealing with for the last two weeks and on top of that, our office-support person has been out for over a week now because her husband had to go in for an emergency surgical operation. Bleh.

As for gaming goodness, I just don't have the required time to put in to make a MMORPG like WoW do-able.. =(

Here's one small vote for continued attempts to make NWN workable for everyone on Sunday evenings. This upcoming weekend is not going to work for me, that much I know already. However, once the holidays simmer down a little bit, I think we'll be cool to get going with this full-swing in a few weeks if anyone is still interested that is.

As a bit of good/interesting news, I've been offered a share of a start up software development company if I run the business end of things for them. I dunno where it's going or if it will even work, but why not.. if it doesn't go anywhere, my end of things is relatively small. If it does go places, then my responsibilities start growing exponentially, but so does our income. The basic premise is to design and develop a complete new game based on the half-life2 engine. The computer fellas have been banging away on the artwork, models and storyline/gameplay for a while now in expectation of the release of HL2 and are now starting to code. More or less, it's about a civil war between Mars and Earth.. the story line sounds pretty cool thus far. Let's hope it goes nuts, we all make millions and retire at 35. Hehe.. hey, we can dream, right?

=)

Late,

~O.

I'm back from time to wreak havoc once again!

- First off, Godsstorm?? risk 2210?? Duelmasters card game? 400 dollars of free games? Please elaborate... I want to play godstorm! Give me an in depth description of the game play! Also what's this about Jon buying twilight imperium, a strategic combat only game? It sounds like the con set some new precedencts into uncharted territory and a whoppin jolly good time. Sorry I missed it!

- SFO EVENTS -- Let's do another BBQ/ Gamesday/ one of these days before Xmas break. What's everones work plans and schedule?

- MP GAMING - Is anyone still playing NWN or is that over and done with? I take it, the new fad is WoW?